Methodologies and Tools for the Evaluation of the Sensitivity to Radiation of SRAM-based FPGAs

This paper aims at describing the tools and methodologies required in order to estimate the sensitivity to radiation of SRAM-based FPGAs and their applications. The specificity of those components is their embedded configuration memory which provides flexibility to the user but also a decreased robustness to particles. Experimental work was done on the Xilinx Virtex-II family and lead to the development of a hardware / software platform able to interface with existing test facilities.